Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This was more about page views. You did the searching yourselves, so they can’t get into searching.

Doyon Kim: Right. Content providers had to get some sort of code from us, but that code could track every activity of people on the website. Sites like TechCrunch implement a code, so we track their website traffic and see what are the most popular articles of the day. We could get everything [and know] overall, what were the most popular articles.

SM: But it required that you became a quoter yourselves, wasn’t it? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 1)

Video games are popular with people of all ages. The popularity of  games like “Farmville” and “Angry Birds” is proof of that. Pangalore, a San Jose, California–based universal social games developing company  launched its Universal Play HTML5 technology in December 2011, further satisfying the public’s desire for more games to play online and making it easier for them to play those games. With Pangalore’s new technology, users can play games on any platform at any time and provides continual saving and updating of their progress.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Doyon. Please give us some context about you and the kinds of things you’ve been involved with, what you’ve been around, and then we will start exploring trends. >>>

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

>>>

Too Much Unmonetized Ad Inventory

If you are a content producer or a freemium app or game developer, you would know, instantly, what I am talking about: there is WAY too much ad inventory out there. Too many eyeballs that are not getting adequately monetized. Major publishers sitting on top of huge masses of unmonetized impressions. Game developers monetizing, barely, 1-2% of their traffic. App developers, similarly, struggling to convert free users to premium.

If you are an entrepreneur, looking for an open problem to solve, look no further. This is your opportunity. In 2012, one of the greatest unaddressed pain points for the Mobile and Online industries is this over abundance of eyeballs that publishers, software, app and game developers are struggling to find monetization models for.

There are many Ad Networks that offer very low monetization rates and take a large sales commission. If you decide that the way you want to address all this is by becoming, yourself, an ad network, that is certainly one way of addressing the pain-point. However, you would need to know how to sell $25-50 CPMs, because at $4-5 CPMs, there is no money for anybody. Not for the network, and not for the publisher. It’s just not worth it. Some vertical ad networks have gone after this opportunity, Glam Media being one of the most successful of the lot.

But, by and large, the problem remains unsolved from the publishers perspective.

Now, if you are an entrepreneur looking for cheap advertising, this actually plays in your favor. However, most ad networks don’t have the kind of self-service mechanisms of buying ad impressions that Google AdSense has, for example. This is a limitation on the side of Ad Networks, who would actually monetize a lot better if they were to open their inventory up to the small-medium businesses.

Now, if you are an Ad Network with the ability to service a large pool of SME advertisers, I would like to hear from you.

Will RIM End Up In Dell’s Arms?

Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) was counting on the BlackBerry Playbook to pull them out of their downward spiral. But there was only a lukewarm reception to the Playbook, and RIM’s future continued to look glum. Gartner estimates that Apple’s iOS will continue to dominate the worldwide media tablet market through 2015. iOS will account for 69% of media tablet operating systems in 2011 and represent 47% of the media tablet market in 2015. Other researchers estimate that Apple iPad sales will reach 24 million this year. Playbook will be a significantly smaller player with 2 million sales, followed by Motorola Xoom’s 1.75 million units. >>>

Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade

2010 is drawing to a close. Mark Zuckerberg has just been named Time’s Person of the Year. We’ve been covering various tech companies and entrepreneurs since 2005, and this year, here is a quick synthesis of what look like the major trends from where I sit: >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2010: i-Jet Media, Silicon Valley, California

i-Jet Media is a social games publisher and social media distribution network. Within the framework of cooperation with social games developers, i-Jet Media examines their games, markets, elaborates on, and adapts games, integrates applications, and provides technical support for users in many world languages. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Brandissimo!, Encino, California

“Kids can smell a rat from a mile away,” says Andy Babb, president of Brandissimo! Inc., a company that tries to keep Babb’s observation in mind and focus on creating good stories and characters for the online games, Web sites, and other content it develops to help companies and brands better engage with children. It is perhaps best known for NFLRush Zone, the online platform and fantasy world that the National Football League (NFL) uses to connect with kids. >>>